Category Archives: Personal

One of Stephen Colbert’s first guests on the Late Show was SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The two had been discussing the future of interplanetary space travel, which Musk commented was only feasible with reusable rockets, lest the project become “crazy expensive.” Colbert played a video clip in which one of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets was attempting to land on a drone ship at sea. As the rocket approached it tilted, unable to maintain its verticality. Moments after it descended through a plume of smoke, it exploded into a fireball.

“It broke a leg on landing,” Musk said.

I had been relating this story to a full room of about 30 senior physics students at my alma mater, Phillipsburg High School (PHS). I had used a connection with a former teacher to solicit an invitation to return and speak, something I had wanted to do for years. I figured that becoming a “real scientist” was sufficient pretext to warrant a visit and presentation of my knowledge, experiences, and yes, opinions. However, I hadn’t settled on what I wanted to say until just the day before.

Continuing my story, I told them how Colbert leaned in empathetically and asked, “How heartbreaking was it to get that close?”

The audience laughed, of course, at the absurdity of a man shaking off such a costly disaster. Musk wasn’t looking at it that way, though. He said, “I think we’re feeling sad, but happy at the same time because if we could reduce the landing velocity, we could cause it to land and stay upright and not explode.”

“That’s one of goals of rockets, isn’t it, to not explode,” Colbert responded to a round of laughter.

Their interaction was meaningful to me, not so much for its content, but for Musk’s demeanor. It seemed as if the insinuation that Musk ought to be upset didn’t even register with him. In his mind he had already moved past it. He recognized that failure was part of the process, an inevitable and expected component of success.

The day before returning to PHS, I made a stop in my home town of Alpha, NJ. I had been invited to speak to Alpha Public School’s (APS) eighth graders about what it takes to become a scientist. Their teacher, Mrs. Flynn, asked her class, “How many of you are thinking about a career in science?” Only one young man in her two science classes raised his hand. Others chimed in later that they were interested in medicine or engineering, indicating that many had not made the connection between the two. I told them what one must study, where one must go to school, and all the work that goes into getting a Ph.D. I spoke to the mechanics of the process, and just like that our 40 minutes was over.

I thanked Mrs. Flynn for being a welcoming host and reminded her that her students could always call on me as a resource if they ever had any questions. They offered few while I was in the room. Perhaps they were intimidated. Or confused. Mrs. Flynn suggested that they all needed to save face around one another. Regardless, I felt I could have done better.

It was still early in the morning, so I exited the school and walked across the street to Myrna’s house. Myrna had been the Alpha Borough librarian for the last 25 years during which time we’d formed a unique bond. She was aware that my mother, who has a personality disorder, would lock me out of the house for hours on end. The Alpha Public Library became my sanctuary, and Myrna, my guardian. I spent countless hours there reading, writing, and being her personal gadfly. She almost always had a package of Butterscotch Krimpets for me, and would occasionally finance my hot dog eating excursions to Charlie’s Pool Room down the street.

Her eyes lit up when she saw me. She invited me in and we both sat down at the kitchen table. “I have something for you,” I said.

I reached into my backpack and pulled out a bound book wrapped in cellophane. I dropped it onto the table with a thud. The cover read, “Improved Galaxy Counting Techniques and Noise Reduction Algorithms as Applied to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.”

“It’s my dissertation!” I said. “Read the dedication.”

Myrna got her glasses and turned to the page. It read:

My “initial conditions” during childhood made it unlikely that I would ever reach this point. Yet I was exceptionally lucky to grow up in the beautiful little borough of Alpha, NJ. Alpha Public School provided me an excellent elementary education, but what really saved me was the Alpha Public Library and its librarian, Myrna. Myrna offered me refuge and support as if I was her own grandson. I am not sure I could have made it through without her. She is a testament to the value of small town public libraries everywhere.

“Oh, Michael,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “This is wonderful.” After a long moment taking it in, she handed me a letter. “Look at this.”

The letter was from the Alpha Borough Council, thanking her for decades of meritorious service at the Alpha Public Library and wishing her well in her retirement.

“You’re retiring!” I exclaimed.

“They’re drumming me out! They think I’m lazy because I won’t learn the new system.”

We sat at that kitchen table for the next four hours, talking about family, things that change, and things that never do. I told her about graduate school, future plans, trips taken, and interests acquired. It was easily the most mature and introspective conversation we’d shared.

“Have you spoken to Mr. Davis,” she asked.

Davis was APS’s 6th-8th grade English teacher, and had been since my time there. Myrna sometimes referred to him as a “wackadoo,” which I always interpreted to mean “an interesting character.” Davis had a penchant for the dramatic, peppering his correspondences with words like “salutations,” “prodigious,” and “burgeoning.” When attempting to arrange my meeting to APS he wrote, “No computer at home–try my utmost to keep alive the inimitable precedent once espoused by the great Ray Bradbury himself.”

“We communicated briefly over email,” I said, “but I haven’t gotten a chance to have a in-person conversation with him yet. Maybe now is a good time to head over and say hi.”

Before I left, Myrna gathered a bunch of little gifts for me – a plastic bookmark that instructed “reading was fundamental”, a wooden ruler, a blue translucent keychain bearing the words “Zikas for Mayor” left over from former Alpha mayor Harry Zikas’s campaign in the early 2000’s, a black and white printout of Phillipsburg’s old silk processing plant, and an Alpha town pin. “Sorry, if I knew you were coming I would have gotten some Krimpets,” she said.

I walked back across the street and reentered APS. I climbed to the second floor and stepped into a large classroom at the end of the hall. The walls were decorated with posters featuring prepositions, parts of speech, and notable quotes. Davis’s old fish tank was still humming in the corner.

“Sir,” he said firmly, extending his hand.

I replied, “Mr. Davis. It’s good to see you.” We spoke for about an hour on a range of interesting topics, but one in particular had been on my mind.

“I’m speaking to the high school kids tomorrow,” I told him. “I haven’t quite figured out what to talk to them about yet.”

Davis asked, “Why did you want to talk to them in the first place?”

“I wanted to give back,” I answered. “I realize that I wouldn’t be here without the help of a small handful of dedicated people, and I count you and Myrna among them. Despite everything else going on at the time, I felt lucky in that regard. If my experiences can make the path easier for someone else, then I’d certainly like to try. I want to offer them the insights and lessons I never received.”

Davis said, “So tell them your life story. Show them what’s possible.”

At the time, I didn’t think of my childhood as anything abnormal. We accept the reality of the world we’re presented, and my reality was relentless exposure to mental illness. I knew that my family didn’t have a lot of money, even by Alpha’s lower middle class standards. I was evicted from my home on two occasions, and eventually moved in with friends.

I admitted to Davis – perhaps the first time I’d admitted this to anyone from Alpha – that this environment had actually turned me into a minor criminal. On days when the library closed early at 5pm, I would sometimes have no place to go to finish my homework. One alternative location I’d staked out was our town’s local Presbyterian church. The building was locked, but they usually keep the basement window slightly ajar, just enough for a small arm to reach inside and rotate the handle. I would shimmy through into the hall where our Boy Scout meetings were held (an activity I eventually quit since I couldn’t afford to do most of the activities), then upstairs to a room where I could do my homework until the sun went down and I ran out of light.1Alerting members of one’s small town to one’s presence in not-one’s church by turning on a light was perceived by me to be a poor idea.

“You made it out on your own steam,” Davis told me.

He advised me to emphasize to the students that no matter how poor they grew up, no matter how many obstacles they faced, or how many rockets blew up in their face, there was always a way out.

I never imagined this would be my message. I envisioned leading classes into deep conversations about the nature of the Universe. The high school students and I would ultimately talk about it, but only briefly, as they seemed surprisingly disinterested in the insights of a real astrophysicist. When I mentioned that Chile’s high-altitude Atacama Desert is an ideal location for observations, one ninth grader asked me the important question, “Are there camels up there?”

“What else should I talk about,” I asked Davis. All these years later I still valued his advice.

“Tell them to think critically. Always examine the assumptions that go into an argument. Strive fervently, but honestly. Never let fear of failure hold you back.”

The following day at PHS a senior honors physics student asked me, “How difficult was it to finish your Ph.D.?” I answered him truthfully saying, “It was really, really hard. I had about five full-fledged theories fail completely. I was on the verge of giving up. But I kept at it.” Then I told the Elon Musk story. It seemed to fit the moment.

Myrna and Davis helped me realize that my return home was less about science, and more about my journey. It was probably naïve to think I could talk about creating a scientific career without first addressing the obstacles so many of us face just getting out the gate, like ignorance, poverty, abuse and lack of guidance. So while I had my peace to say on course selection, careers in science, and climate change, everything I had to offer was the consequence of a stubborn refusal to let my early circumstances define me. I learned that through it all, it was the personal story that was most compelling.

It may be nothing more than sweet solace at the end of an otherwise disappointing season for the Buffalo Bills, but damn, their win over the NY Jets in their regular season finale sure does feel good. The scenario was this: if the Jets beat the Bills, they were in the playoffs. If they lost and the Pittsburgh Steelers won against the hapless Cleveland Browns, the Steelers would take their place in the postseason. Coincidently, Baltimore’s Buffalo Bills bar, The Rockwell, and its Steelers bar, Todd Connor’s, are right next door to one another. Late in the fourth quarter, the Bills intercepted a Jets pass, effectively sealing the game for Buffalo and sending the Steelers to the playoffs. In response, we Bills fans decided to parade our celebration straight through Todd Connor’s! Watch a rare moment of simulataneous sports elation.

On Saturday afternoon a cyclist was struck and killed immediately across the street from my house. As someone who cycles almost every day through the exact same location, this has affected me greatly. It is worth noting that my neighborhood is normally safe for joggers and cyclists. It’s rare for 15 minutes to pass without at least one passing by. We have wide streets and a newly paved, dedicated bike lane. And still this.

A few minutes ago I went across the street to the site of the crash to join about 40 other cyclists who had arrived for a vigil. The only sound to break the silence was the ocassional sniffle. Then, as if to bring everything that was wrong about this situation into focus, a car traveling 20mph over the speed limit raced passed our location.

A man immediately screamed, “Slow down! You are part of the problem!” This worked him up enough to continue. “Each day, every day, all of us go through this! All of us know how close we’ve all come to being hit.”

I couldn’t agree more.

If anything is to come from this tragedy (aside from the sensationalism that it was a bishop who struck a bike-maker), it should be a discussion about the relationship between cyclists and drivers on city roads. More often than not I hear drivers complain about the aggressive nature of cyclists. They drive too fast. They veer into driving lanes. They ride on streets with little to no shoulder. They don’t care about cars.

Cyclists, however, are risking their lives whenever they climb onto a bicycle. We contend with shoulders that are often too narrow and in disrepair. Even those in good condition are often littered with broken bottles, slippery pebbles and roadkill. Cars whiz by at terrifying speeds, sometimes coming within a few inches of clipping me. Were I swerve at just the wrong time to avoid hazards like a slitted sewer grate or fruit fallen from a tree, I could die.

I have had cars drive across a bike lane to make a turn without even realizing I was there. Within the last month I almost crashed into a car door because a parked driver neglected to check her mirror before opening it into a bike lane.

I can’t say whether I’m in the minority, but I cannot recall ever having a conversation about the relationship between cars and bicycles in Driver’s Ed. This seems such a shame because the two sides so frequently seem to be at odds with one another. Motorists complain that cyclists are entitled and reckless. Cyclists complain that motorists are dangerous and oblivious.

Earlier today I was speaking with a very nice woman who lives just down the road from me. As discussion turned to the accident she commented about another local road, “I just can’t believe cyclists drive up Falls Road. It’s so dangerous. They shouldn’t do that.”

I replied, “I bike Falls all the time. If you look at the signage it is dedicated bike route.”

She said, “But it’s a two lane road with such a small shoulder. And there are so many turns. It’s too risky for bikes to be there.”

“Not if cars are going the speed limit. And cyclists try to avoid major roads when possible. They aren’t exactly fun be on. But in this case if you want to get beyond the beltway, you have maybe 4 roads total and 2 are them are so dangerous they shouldn’t even be attempted.”

I’m pretty sure this was news to her.

I will continue to ride my bike. Since I own no car, I have little other option. But every day I do so I am placing my life in the hands of drivers who may have no idea what being on a bike is like. I can only hope that the hundreds of candles and flowers adorning a lonely brick fence on Roland Avenue this freezing cold night will start to tell that story.

The Buffalo Bills defeated the Green Bay Packers on Sunday in what many are calling the team’s biggest win in a decade. Green Bay is considered a Super Bowl favorite. They had been riding a 5 game winning streak and were winners of 9 of their last 10. The Bills absolutely needed this game to keep hopes of ending their 14-year playoff drought alive.

They showed up in a big way. Aaron Rodgers, considered by many to be the league’s best quarterback, was harassed by the Buffalo defense all afternoon and suffered through a career worst day. On the game’s penultimate series the Packers had the ball deep in Buffalo territory down 6. They needed to score a touchdown in less than 2 minutes and with no time outs. Instead, Bills defensive end Mario Williams bumrushed Rodgers, sacked him and stripped the ball. The referee called a safety on the field then this happened:

This historic victory also marks my very first Vine video! Vine is designed to be used on your smartphone or tablet. It isn’t optimized to accept video recorded in other places, like mine was (thanks Flipcam). I learned that to import an edited video from programs like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro one needs to output to 480 x 480 at 30 fps with mono sound. The video must then be imported into your phone’s camera/video roll (I did this by emailing it to myself) from which it can then be uploaded to Vine.

By the way, this video was shot at The Rockwell, a bar in Fells Point, Baltimore. It hosts the Charm City Bills Backers by exclusively airing their game on the big screen. It’s almost always a fun time.

A lot of people ask me to describe my thesis research. I used to give a complicated answer about using covariance matrices to perform a Karhunen-Loève transform to blah blah blah, but now I just say, “I clean cosmic data.” Today I created a graphic that illustrates the essence of what I’m trying to do.

Notice how both the signal and noise have “structure”? My research attempts to uncover those structures and use them to eliminate the noise. The problem is that taking away noise also takes away signal. So we need a way to “fill in the gaps.”

Now imagine doing this not for images, but for MASSIVE data sets…and you don’t get to know what the letters are beforehand. Solving this problem to high accuracy is a challenge.

At the boundary of the Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu lies Top Station, an idyllic hill location that stands at the highest point of the Munnar-Kodaikanal Road. Top Station is about one mile above sea level. On clear days visitors are afforded wonderful views of the surrounding countryside. On days like the one depicted in this video, clouds roll over the mountains providing the calm sensation of being in a cloud forest.

Continuing with the theme of my travels through India, today I present an interactive panorama from the state of Kerala. The images that comprise this panorama were taken at the Windermere Estate near Munnar, Kerala at sunrise. Here the sun rises over the eastern mountains while the hills cascade downward to the south, disappearing into the early morning haze. Here’s the location:

The Indian state of Kerala is referred to by many as the “Venice of the East” by virtue of its many channels, backwaters and lush green vegetation. One of the more popular attractions in the city of Alleppey is a houseboat tour. In this video, I chronicle what it is like to take an overnight excursion on one of these boats.

In the second part of the video, I head east into the mountains to the Mattupatti Dam Reservoir near the town of Munnar. We rent a paddleboat and take it onto the water for a first hand look at the reservoir and beautiful surrounding area.

About Me

Hi, I’m Mike Specian. I am currently a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow hosted at the U.S. Department of Energy. This site is a repository for things that matter to me including science, energy, climate, public policy, and photography from around the world. You can follow me on Twitter, through an RSS feed or by subscribing to email updates below.